I was never happy with my first attempt at painting for this workshop. I chose two very difficult images to try and replicate once screwed up. However I kept the painting as I wanted to do something with it, I wasn't sure what but was always thinking it would mean deconstructing and building it again.
I liked some of the detail, areas that worked but as a whole piece, no.
So I decided to start by cutting it up. Into lots of small pieces and then started putting it back together again. To start with quite organised and regular to mix up the colours and see what happened, how the dynamics changed.
I still wasn't sure if this was working, it still felt too much like the original and also was too graphic, too arranged. I had some pieces left over of the original painting so I decided to tear these and see how they could work added to the grid. The more I covered the grid the more I felt it work, it became more balanced, interesting. You started to look at the whole image rather than all the individual shapes.
The question am I now asking myself is shall I leave it here or shall I do the same thing again, albeit with different cuts and shapes to see how much further I can take it. If I cut it up again and made it smaller but thicker it could take on a new view.
On researching artists who use collage and in particular torn paper collages I was reading about Sir Eduardo Paolozzi who used torn paper for a large piece he had been commissioned to do for an office environment. The paper and the chaos it represented was to reflect the paper and disorderly state and office can be, nothing regular, nothing lining up, chance positionings of documents, folders, notebooks, desks and the clutter of an working space.
While Paolozzi was studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the late 1940's he was influenced by the work of Jean Arp and his Dada work. Arp's was working at a time when artists were trying to break away from the ordinary. He also used chance as a way to create his work, having tried to make the work work he discovered that some pieces had fallen to the floor and by chance they arranged themselves in a patter and arrangement that he felt agreeable and better than when he had tried to position them. It sounds simple and naive now but back then it was such a bold thing to do.
What particularly struck me about the similarities of both these works was not only the method of creating but the reasons for the actions behind them, or rather lack of reasons in Arp's piece. I didn't know what to do with the piece and so cut up a previous piece and it was only by looking at the remaining pieces did I start to see possibilities. I tried not to think about the arrangement but your brain is constantly organising, suggesting positions and combinations. Arp declared it was all down to chance but there must have been some part of him making conscious decisions as to what went where or why a certain arrangement worked better than another.
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